Issue 5: Winter 2009 / '10
La Coquille et le Clergyman (Light Cone DVD)
Light Cone's handsome, bilingual DVD edition of the 1927 French avant-garde classic The Seashell and the Clergyman (La Coquille et le Clergyman) is taken from the 2004 Nederlands Filmmuseum restoration. A film by Germaine Dulac, The Seashell was scripted by Antonin Artaud. The factious circumstances of this collaboration is the chief preoccupation of the DVD's bonus material: a long essay by Alain and Odette Virmaux about precisely this subject, and two meaty documentaries. This documentation concludes that Artaud, hoping for a more equal partnership, was closed out of the creative process by Dulac at the start of filming to ensure her creative control of the project. However, she remained faithful to his screenplay and intended that he play the film's lead role right up to the last minute, when another acting commitment made him unavailable for the necessary amount of time. Hardly an exceptional state of affairs given the general vicissitudes of filmmaking. The amount of attention lavished on it is, of course, due to the subsequent deification of Artaud, and Dulac's eclipse and comparative neglect, as well as to this film's very chequered reputation. Did Dulac, as many would have it, make a dreadful film of Artaud's project?
This DVD is ample evidence that she did not. In fact, Dulac's The Seashell and the Clergyman remains a wonder to watch. It predates Buñuel and Dalí's Un Chien andalou (1928) as arguably the first Surrealist film. The imagery unleashed by the Spanish filmmakers remains indelibly forceful as much thanks to the pugnaciously no-nonsense style that they adopted as to the content of what was depicted. Dulac's more ornately precious film doesn't have Un Chien andalou's almost unbelievably time-proof stylistic robustness, but The Seashell's strength, when viewed today, no longer resides in its ‘startling' imagery. Its greatness stems from the way these images flow, not just in terms of structure or editing, but also in the way shots are designed to work as part of this continuum. This is not mere technical facility or ‘good grammer'; there is a coherent vision being articulated which brings editing and plastic values closer to collapsing into one effort than any other film I can think of. It is less what the current (or next) image is that fascinates than how the next image will arise- or, even, where the current image will flee to.
The many interconnecting ways in which this tension is achieved would require a long study to enumerate, so a few examples will have to suffice. The most obvious and recurrent one is the use of diagonals both in the film's design and camera angles. This visual strategy makes the viewer aware of space outside the frame, leaving the image vertiginously ‘open' to what is beyond the immediately visible, distancing the audience and destabilising its habitual engagement with the current image as a stable present moment.
As a narrative, The Seashell is also designed to ‘move beyond' itself. Its key moment occurs quite early on, as the Clergyman enters a church at the end of a sequence during which he has been crawling and then running through empty city streets. It opened with a series of sucessive forward travelling shots along streets, each joined with a dissolve. The latter part of this sequence, involving the running Clergyman, is intercut with shots of other characters in the church, a scene which he is about to enter. Even within this film's unconventional progression, when the Clergyman goes into the church one assumes that Dulac will stay with what is about to unfold there. Her masterstroke is to cut back to another rapid tracking shot, fleeing along the middle of an empty street, before returning to the church scene. In this shot, the film overshoots itself, declaring its existence beyond what is being seen and its freedom to move anywhere in this universe it creates. Yet its generation of images is not limited to flights, actual or suggested, from the current scene or shot. Images can also appear from within the shot, as superimpositions and small images placed within the full frame.
This variety highlights the many contrasts circulating through The Seashell and the Clergyman, not the least of which is between high artifice and almost documentary plein air settings. Judging by what the script demands, one might be forgiven for expecting numerous violent ruptrures, the sort of Surrealist shock one experiences many times with Un Chien andalou. Instead, Dulac rejects fragmentation in favour of an oddly coherent sense of constant flow that posits the natural and artificial, the inner and outer, and any number of other apparent opposites, within one elaborate cinematic flux.
Is this accomplishment solely due to the inspiration of Artaud's screenplay? Further DVD releases of Dulac's films, ideally up to excellent standard of this Light Cone edition, would do much to broaden that debate...
- Maximilian Le Cain
To purchse this DVD, visit Re:Voir Video's website.